May 11, 2010

Mindy Lubber's Strong Message from #ceres10 on #sustainnow

At the end of Ceres 2010, Mindy Lubber, President of Ceres, held a conference debrief session with Bill Baue.

Here is
Mindy's statement in brief,

"Sustainability has to be integrated to what we do.. our earnestness and starting on solutions is more rapid than before...the goal of our conference is about taking it up a new notch and setting up a series of new best practices...working with companies to integrate sustainability into everything they do... products, facilities, holding supply chain accountability and tying that to CEO compensation and all they do."

Mindy went on to quantify what she means by a new and higher standard,"Setting new standards, higher standards and acting more quickly and comprehensively. It is no longer about one off deals, e.g. carbon footprint or energy efficiency, ....every part of a strategic plan ,--- climate change, water shortages, human rights, worker safety...hence results at every level of the firm."

Finally, Mindy pointed to the greatest challenge America faces now of societal scale. "Paralysis in our nation's capital has to stop relative to climate, water and more. Are we continuing to build a society around fossil fuels and have more oil spills or build an economy around Clean Tech so that the US does not become a player left behind in the dust?"

You can view the full interview of Mindy Lubber by Bill Baue here on 3BLMedia TV.

Along with reviewing all of #Ceres10 media, in recent weeks I have been investigating other strong messages.

A "Why so Few?" released by The American Association of University Women, provides a very powerful "strong" hidden message. The report is a summary of research conducted by AAUW to examine why so few women work in STEM careers. This report provides a complete summary of the obstacles that stand in the way of women succeeding in careers as scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians.

In reading this report, I discovered a hidden jewel that in my opinion is stronger than the research outcome. It is the implications of the research on what this implies to the US culture of education and its preparation of people for professions based on STEM studies. These implications go beyond the study of diversity and gender. They leadership issues faced by institutional leaders and economic decisions makers that are obstructing US Society to accelerate in the direction of need described by Mindy Lubber.

This report underscores the realities that our economy is faced with today as follows:

1. The future of our world relies on science, technology, engineering and mathematics. We have structured our research and commercial centers that generate products and services based on these disciplines with a push for rapid forms of production that derail the quality of learning for the people who carry out this work and therefore has production cycle of knowledge and product generation that is not productive for society today.

2. The culture of these institutions is critical, negative and competitive and does not create healthy environments in which people can learn through hard work to succeed.

3. The culture of pedagogical learning is out of date. US Education needs to embrace a form of learning that recognizes difficulty and the frustration of learning that does not come easy.

This is the most useful learning for today. Risk does not include encouraging and building learning environments where the heightened potential for risk is equated with is a potential for failure that is truly part of any path of success to discover complex answers and applications of knowledge.

The implications of this report to Mindy Lubber's strong message is basic to encouraging new formats of learning and building new economic models for government, research, academic institutions and commercial interests. I coach my clients on the necessity of strong
messages and why.

The why is simple: organization culture has to embrace the creation of value for encouragement and accomplishment as critical keys to her success. I advise all my clients to ignore personal reactions to negativity, criticism and competitive aspects of the culture and build a matrix of activity that can define a new format of success by monitoring and measuring accomplishment as a focus which in turn will result in sales.

When designing a culture of change I can develop a program that catalyzes sustainable sales and income to this company because the emerging sustainable culture looks to this as part of any company brand.What Mindy Lubber delivered in her strong message can only be built by leading a culture that embraces this format of learning and education. It implies a culture of change, ethic and consciousness of practice that is what I know many men and women now include in their work.

Mindy Lubber's powerful message catalyzes for any leader today their role in leading a strategy of action and operations agenda that gets down to business as needed and not business as usual for health, environment and people. This is the mandate now for all CSR and sustainability leaders to learn in good company of others through the frustration of learning that embraces the "failure of learning" as part of the reward of success.

Watch for my next post on "governance" versus leaning to form brand." drawn from conversation between Jeffrey Hollender, Chairman of Seventh Generation and Aman Singh, CSR Editor for Vault.com.

Comments

At the end of Ceres 2010, Mindy Lubber, President of Ceres, held a conference debrief session with Bill Baue.

Here is
Mindy's statement in brief,

"Sustainability has to be integrated to what we do.. our earnestness and starting on solutions is more rapid than before...the goal of our conference is about taking it up a new notch and setting up a series of new best practices...working with companies to integrate sustainability into everything they do... products, facilities, holding supply chain accountability and tying that to CEO compensation and all they do."

Mindy went on to quantify what she means by a new and higher standard,"Setting new standards, higher standards and acting more quickly and comprehensively. It is no longer about one off deals, e.g. carbon footprint or energy efficiency, ....every part of a strategic plan ,--- climate change, water shortages, human rights, worker safety...hence results at every level of the firm."

Finally, Mindy pointed to the greatest challenge America faces now of societal scale. "Paralysis in our nation's capital has to stop relative to climate, water and more. Are we continuing to build a society around fossil fuels and have more oil spills or build an economy around Clean Tech so that the US does not become a player left behind in the dust?"

You can view the full interview of Mindy Lubber by Bill Baue here on 3BLMedia TV.

Along with reviewing all of #Ceres10 media, in recent weeks I have been investigating other strong messages.

A "Why so Few?" released by The American Association of University Women, provides a very powerful "strong" hidden message. The report is a summary of research conducted by AAUW to examine why so few women work in STEM careers. This report provides a complete summary of the obstacles that stand in the way of women succeeding in careers as scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians.

In reading this report, I discovered a hidden jewel that in my opinion is stronger than the research outcome. It is the implications of the research on what this implies to the US culture of education and its preparation of people for professions based on STEM studies. These implications go beyond the study of diversity and gender. They leadership issues faced by institutional leaders and economic decisions makers that are obstructing US Society to accelerate in the direction of need described by Mindy Lubber.

This report underscores the realities that our economy is faced with today as follows:

1. The future of our world relies on science, technology, engineering and mathematics. We have structured our research and commercial centers that generate products and services based on these disciplines with a push for rapid forms of production that derail the quality of learning for the people who carry out this work and therefore has production cycle of knowledge and product generation that is not productive for society today.

2. The culture of these institutions is critical, negative and competitive and does not create healthy environments in which people can learn through hard work to succeed.

3. The culture of pedagogical learning is out of date. US Education needs to embrace a form of learning that recognizes difficulty and the frustration of learning that does not come easy.

This is the most useful learning for today. Risk does not include encouraging and building learning environments where the heightened potential for risk is equated with is a potential for failure that is truly part of any path of success to discover complex answers and applications of knowledge.

The implications of this report to Mindy Lubber's strong message is basic to encouraging new formats of learning and building new economic models for government, research, academic institutions and commercial interests. I coach my clients on the necessity of strong
messages and why.

The why is simple: organization culture has to embrace the creation of value for encouragement and accomplishment as critical keys to her success. I advise all my clients to ignore personal reactions to negativity, criticism and competitive aspects of the culture and build a matrix of activity that can define a new format of success by monitoring and measuring accomplishment as a focus which in turn will result in sales.

When designing a culture of change I can develop a program that catalyzes sustainable sales and income to this company because the emerging sustainable culture looks to this as part of any company brand.What Mindy Lubber delivered in her strong message can only be built by leading a culture that embraces this format of learning and education. It implies a culture of change, ethic and consciousness of practice that is what I know many men and women now include in their work.

Mindy Lubber's powerful message catalyzes for any leader today their role in leading a strategy of action and operations agenda that gets down to business as needed and not business as usual for health, environment and people. This is the mandate now for all CSR and sustainability leaders to learn in good company of others through the frustration of learning that embraces the "failure of learning" as part of the reward of success.

Watch for my next post on "governance" versus leaning to form brand." drawn from conversation between Jeffrey Hollender, Chairman of Seventh Generation and Aman Singh, CSR Editor for Vault.com.